The Google mess hall comes into view, wide and low, a white pavilion staked out like a garden party. The front is open, tarp pulled up above the entryways, and short lines of Googlers poke out onto the lawn.
Kat pauses, squinting. Calculating. “This one,” she says finally, and tugs me over to the leftmost line. “I’m a pretty good queue strategist. But it’s not easy here—”
“Because everyone at Google is a queue strategist,” I suggest.
“Exactly. So sometimes there’s bluffing. This guy’s a bluffer,” she says, jabbing the Googler just ahead of us in line with her elbow. He’s tall and sandy-haired and he looks like a surfer.
“Hey, I am Finn,” he says, holding out a blocky, long-fingered hand. “Your first visit to Google?” He says it Gew-gell, with a little pause in the middle.
It is indeed, my ambiguously European friend. I make small talk: “How’s the food?”
“Oh, fantastic. The chef is famous …” He pauses. Something clicks. “Kat, he must use the other line.”
“Right. I always forget,” Kat says. She explains, “Our food is personalized. It has vitamins, some natural stimulants.”
Finn nods vigorously. “I am experimenting with my potassium level. Now I am up to eleven bananas every day. Body hacking!” His face splits into a wide grin. Wait, did the couscous salad have stimulants?
“Sorry,” Kat says, frowning. “The visitor line is over there.” She points across the lawn, and I leave her with the body-hacking Eurosurfer.
So now I’m waiting next to a sign that says EXTERNAL DEPENDENCIES alongside three dudes in khakis and blue button-downs with leather phone holsters. Across the grass, the Googlers all wear snug jeans and bright T-shirts.
Kat is talking to someone else now, a slender brown-skinned boy who’s joined the line just behind her. He’s dressed like a skater, so I assume he has a PhD in artificial intelligence. A lance of jealousy spikes down behind my eyes, but I’m prepared for it; I knew it would come, here in the crystal castle where Kat knows everyone and everyone knows her. So I just let it pass, and I remind myself that she brought me here. This is the trump card in these situations: Yes, everyone else is smart, everyone else is cool, everyone else is healthy and attractive—but she brought you. You have to wear that like a pin, like a badge.
I look down and realize my visitor badge actually says that—
NAME: Clay Jannon
COMPANY: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
HOST: Kat Potente
—so I peel it off and stick it a little higher up on my shirt.
The food is, as promised, fantastic. I get two scoops of lentil salad and a thick pink stripe of fish, seven sturdy green lines of asparagus, and a single chocolate-chip cookie that has been optimized for crispiness.
Kat waves me over to a table near the pavilion’s perimeter, where a quick breeze is rustling the white tarp. Little slices of light dance across the table, which has a paper covering marked out with a pale blue grid. At Google, they eat lunch on graph paper.
“This is Raj,” she says, waving a forkful of lentil salad (which looks just like mine) at the skater PhD. “We went to school together.” Kat studied symbolic systems at Stanford. Did everybody here go to Stanford? Do they just give you a job at Google when you graduate?
When Raj speaks, he seems suddenly ten years older. His voice is clipped and direct: “So what do you do?”
I hoped that question would be outlawed here, replaced by some quirky Google equivalent, like: What’s your favorite prime number? I point at my badge and concede that I work at the opposite of Google.
“Ah, books.” Raj pauses a moment, chewing. Then his brain slots into a groove: “You know, old books are a big problem for us. Old knowledge in general. We call it OK. Old knowledge, OK. Did you know that ninety-five percent of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite—in fact, OK accounts for most things that most people know, and have ever known.”
Raj is not blinking, and possibly not breathing.
“So where is it, right? Where’s the OK? Well, it’s in old books, for one thing”—he uncaps a thin-tipped marker (where did that come from?) and starts drawing on the graph-paper tablecloth—”and it’s also in people’s heads, a lot of traditional knowledge, that’s what we call TK. OK and TK.” He’s drawing little overlapping blobs, labeling them with acronyms. “Imagine if we could make all that OK/TK available all the time, to everyone. On the web, on your phone. No question would go unanswered ever again.”
I wonder what Raj has in his lunch.
“Vitamin D, omega-3s, fermented tea leaves,” he says, still scribbling. He makes a single dot off to the side of the blobs and smooshes the marker down, making the black ink bleed. “That’s what we’ve got stored in the Big Box right now,” he says, pointing to the dot, “and just think how valuable it is. If we could add all this”—he sweeps his hand across the OK/TK blobs like a general planning conquest—”then we could really get serious.”
“Raj has been at Google a long time,” Kat says. We’re wandering away from the mess hall. I snagged an extra cookie on the way out, and I’m nibbling on it now. “He’s pre-IPO and he was PM for ages.”
The acronyms at this place! But I think I know this one. “Wait”—I’m confused—”Google has a prime minister?”
“Ha, no,” she says. “Product Management. It’s a committee. It used to be two people, then it was four, now it’s bigger. Sixty-four. The PM runs the company. They approve new projects, assign engineers, allocate resources.”
“So these are all the top executives.”
“No, that’s the thing. It’s a lottery. Your name gets drawn and you serve on the PM for twelve months. Anybody could be chosen. Raj, Finn, me. Pepper.”
“Pepper?”
“The chef.”
Wow—it’s so egalitarian it’s beyond democracy. I realize: “It’s jury duty.”
“You’re not eligible until you’ve worked here for a year,” Kat explains. “And you can get out of it if you’re working on something super-super-important. But people take it really seriously.”
I wonder if Kat Potente has been summoned.
She shakes her head. “Not yet,” she says. “But I’d love to do it. I mean, the odds aren’t great. Thirty thousand people work here, there are sixty-four on the PM. You do the math. But it’s growing all the time. People say they might expand it again.”
Now I’m wondering what it would be like if we ran the whole country like this.
“That’s totally what Raj wants to do!” Kat laughs. “After he finds all the OK and TK, of course.” She shakes her head at that; she’s making fun of him a little. “He has a whole plan to pass a constitutional amendment. If anybody could do it …” Pursed lips again. “Actually, it probably wouldn’t be Raj.” She laughs, and I do, too. Yeah, Raj is a little too intense for Middle America.
So I ask, “Who could pull it off?”
“Maybe I could,” Kat says, puffing her chest out.
Maybe you could.
———
We walk past Kat’s domain: data viz. It’s perched on a low hill, a cluster of prefab boxes set around a small amphitheater where stone steps lead down to a bank of giant screens. We peek down. There’s a pair of engineers sitting on the amphitheater steps, laptops on their knees, watching a cluster of bubbles bounce around on one screen, all connected with wavy lines. Every few seconds the bubbles freeze and the lines snap straight, like the hair sticking up on the back of your neck. Then the screen flashes solid red. One of the engineers mutters a quiet curse and leans in to her laptop.
Kat shrugs. “Work in progress.”
“What’s it for?”
“Not sure. Probably something internal. Most of the stuff we do is internal.” She sighs. “Google’s so big, it’s an audience all by itself. I mostly make visualizations that get used by other engineers, or ad sales, or
the PM …” She trails off. “To tell you the truth, I’d love to make something everybody could see!” She laughs as if relieved to say it out loud.
We pass through a glade of tall cypress on the edge of campus—it makes a nice golden dapple on the sidewalk—and come to a low brick building with no marking other than a handwritten sign taped to the dark glass door:
BOOK SCANNER
Inside, the building feels like a field hospital. It’s dark and a little warm. Harsh floodlights glare down on an operating table ringed with long, many-jointed metal arms. The air stings like bleach. The table is also surrounded by books: stacks and stacks of them, piled high on metal carts. There are big books and little books; there are bestsellers and old books that look like they would fit in at Penumbra’s. I spy Dashiell Hammett.
A tall Googler named Jad runs the book scanner. He has a perfectly triangular nose over a fuzzy brown beard. He looks like a Greek philosopher. Maybe it’s just because he’s wearing sandals.
“Hey, welcome,” he says, smiling, shaking Kat’s hand, then mine. “Nice to have somebody from data viz in here. And you …?” He looks at me, eyebrows raised.
“Not a Googler,” I confess. “I work at an old bookstore.”
“Oh, cool,” Jad says. Then he darkens: “Except, I mean. Sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“Well. For putting you guys out of business.” He says it very matter-of-factly.
“Wait, which guys?”
“Book … stores?”
Right. I don’t actually think of myself as part of the book business; Penumbra’s store feels like something else entirely. But … I do sell books. I am the manager of a Google ad campaign designed to reach potential book buyers. Somehow it snuck up on me: I am a bookseller.
Jad continues, “I mean, once we’ve got everything scanned, and cheap reading devices are ubiquitous … nobody’s going to need bookstores, right?”
“Is that the business model for this?” I say, nodding at the scanner. “Selling e-books?”
“We don’t really have a business model.” Jad shrugs. “We don’t need one. The ads make so much money, it kinda takes care of everything.” He turns to Kat: “Don’t you think that’s right? Even if we made, like, five … million … dollars?” (He’s not sure if that sounds like a lot of money or not. For the record: it does.) “Yeah, nobody would even notice. Over there”—he waves a long arm vaguely back toward the center of campus—”they make that much, like, every twenty minutes.”
That is super-depressing. If I made five million dollars selling books, I’d want people to carry me around in a palanquin constructed from first editions of The Dragon-Song Chronicles.
“Yeah, that’s more or less right”—Kat nods—”but it’s a good thing. It gives us freedom. We can think long-term. We can invest in stuff like this.” She steps closer to the scanner’s bright table with its long metal arms. Her eyes are wide and glinting in the light. “Just look at it.”
“Anyway, sorry,” Jad says to me quietly.
“We’ll be fine,” I say. “People still like the smell of books.” And besides, Jad’s book scanner isn’t the only project with far-off funding. Penumbra’s has a patron of its own.
I dig the logbook out of my bag and hand it over. “Here’s the patient.”
Jad holds it under the floodlights. “This is a beautiful book,” he says. He runs long fingers across the embossing on the cover. “What is it?”
“Just a personal diary.” I pause. “Very personal.”
He gently opens the logbook and clips the front and back of the cover into a right-angled metal frame. No spines broken here. Then he places the frame on the table and locks it down with four clicky brackets. Finally, he gives it a test wiggle; the frame and its passenger are secure. The logbook is strapped in like a test pilot, or a crash-test dummy.
Jad scoots us back away from the scanner. “Stay behind this,” he says, pointing to a yellow line on the floor. “The arms are sharp.”
His long fingers go tap-tap behind a bank of flat monitors. There’s a low, gut-rumbling hum, then a high warning chime, and then the book scanner leaps into action. The floodlights start strobing, turning everything in the chamber into a stop-motion movie. Frame by frame, the scanner’s spidery arms reach down, grasp page corners, peel them back. It’s mesmerizing. I’ve never seen anything at once so fast and so delicate. The arms stroke the pages, caress them, smooth them down. This thing loves books.
At each flash of the lights, two giant cameras set above the table swivel and snap images in tandem. I sidle up next to Jad, where I can see the pages of the logbook stacking up on his monitors. The two cameras are like two eyes, so the images are in 3-D, and I watch his computer lift the words right up off the pale gray pages. It looks like an exorcism.
I walk back over to Kat. Her toes are on the yellow line and she’s leaning in close to the book scanner. I’m afraid she’s going to get stabbed in the eye.
“This is awesome,” she breathes.
It really is. I feel a pang of pity for the logbook, its secrets all plucked out in minutes by this whirlwind of light and metal. Books used to be pretty high-tech, back in the day. Not anymore.
THE FOUNDER’S PUZZLE
IT’S LATER, around eight, and we are in Kat’s spaceship-pod bedroom, at her white spaceship-console desk. She’s sitting on my lap, leaning in to her MacBook. She’s explaining OCR, the process by which a computer transforms swoops of ink and streaks of graphite into characters it can comprehend, like K and A and T.
“It’s not trivial,” she says. “That was a big book.” Also, my predecessors had handwriting almost as bad as mine. But Kat has a plan. “It would take my computer all night to process these pages,” she says. “But we’re impatient, right?” She’s typing at warp ten, composing long commands I do not understand. Yes, we are definitely impatient.
“So we’ll get hundreds of machines to do it all at once. We’ll use Hadoop.”
“Hadoop.”
“Everybody uses it. Google, Facebook, the NSA. It’s software—it breaks a big job into lots of tiny pieces and spreads them out to lots of different computers at the same time.”
Hadoop! I love the sound of it. Kat Potente, you and I will have a son, and we will name him Hadoop, and he will be a great warrior, a king!
She stretches forward, her palms planted on the desk. “I love this.” Her eyes are set firmly on the screen, where a diagram is blossoming: a skeletal flower with a blinking center and dozens—no, hundreds—of petals. It’s growing fast, transforming from a daisy to a dandelion to a giant sunflower. “A thousand computers are doing exactly what I want right now. My mind is not just here,” she says, tapping her head, “it’s out there. I love it—the feeling.”
She moves against me. I can smell everything sharply all of a sudden; her hair, shampooed recently, is up against my face. Her earlobes stick out a little, round and pink, and her back is strong from the Google climbing wall. I trace my thumbs down her shoulder blades, across the bumps of her bra straps. She moves again, rocking. I push up her T-shirt and the letters, squished, reflect in the laptop screen: BAM!
Later, Kat’s laptop makes a low chime. She slides away from me, hops off the bed, and climbs back onto her black desk chair. Perched there on her toes, her spine curving down into the screen, she looks like a gargoyle. A beautiful naked-girl-shaped gargoyle.
“It worked,” she says. She turns to me, flushed, her hair dark and wild. Grinning. “It worked!”
It’s way past midnight, and I’m back at the bookstore. The real logbook is safely on its shelf. The fake logbook is tucked into my bag. Everything has gone exactly according to plan. I’m alert, I’m feeling good, and I’m ready to visualize. I pull the scanned data out of the Big Box; it takes less than a minute over bootynet. All the little tales anyone has ever scratched into that logbook stream back into my laptop, perfectly processed.
Now, computer, it is time for you to do my biddi
ng.
This sort of thing never works perfectly at first. I pipe the raw text into the visualization and it looks like Jackson Pollock got his hands on my prototype. There are splotches of data everywhere, blobs of pink and green and yellow, all harsh arcade-game hues.
The first thing I do is change the palette. Earth tones, please.
Now: I’m dealing with too much information here. I only want to see who borrowed what. Kat’s analysis was smart enough to tag names and titles and times in the text, and the visualization knows how to plot those, so I link data to display and I see something familiar: a swarm of colored lights bouncing through the shelves, each one representing a customer. These, though, are customers from years ago.
It doesn’t look like much—just a colorful mess migrating through the Waybacklist. Then, on a hunch, I connect the dots, so it’s not a swarm but a set of constellations. Every customer leaves a trail, a drunken zigzag through the shelves. The shortest constellation, rendered in red clay, makes a tiny Z, just four data points. The longest, in dark moss, curves around the whole width of the store in a long jagged oval.
It still doesn’t look like much. I give the 3-D bookstore a push with the trackpad and set it spinning on its axes. I stand up to stretch my legs. On the other side of the desk, I pick up one of the Dashiell Hammetts, untouched by anyone since I noticed them that first day in the store. That’s sad. I mean, seriously: shelves full of gibberish get all the attention while The Maltese Falcon gathers dust? It’s beyond sad. It’s stupid. I should start looking for a different job. This place will drive me nuts.
When I come back to the desk, the bookstore is still spinning, whirling like a carousel … and something strange is happening. Once every rotation, the dark moss constellation snaps into focus. For just a moment, it makes a picture and—it can’t be. I smack my hand on the trackpad, slow the model to a halt, and bring it back around. The dark moss constellation makes a clear picture. The other constellations fit, too. None of them are as complete as the dark moss, but they follow the curve of a chin, the slope of an eye. When the model is lined up straight, as if I were peering in from the front door—very close to where I’m sitting right now—the constellations come to life. They make a face.